Abstract/Summary

Achieving a caring city needs to emerge and be sustained through care-full interfaces between city dwellers and policy-makers. This paper outlines the rationale behind a relational understanding of urban care as ‘caring—with’ and reflects on how this approach can be implemented in situated research practices. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s proposition of ‘caring—with’ as a different and more holistic way of envisaging care as “an ongoing system of caring acts in which we’re sometimes on an extreme end of the giving–receiving scale, and sometimes in the middle”, we use the term ‘caring—with’ in an attempt to move beyond understandings and implementations of urban care as a provision from institutions to individuals, or from individual to individual. This points to active forms of care that reformulate relationships, instead of presuming the caring as active and the cared-for as passive recipients. The paper draws together reflections on the theoretical framework of Caring—with Cities (2021–23), a collaborative interdisciplinary research project which investigated multiple and diverse forms of caring across neighbourhoods, towns and cities in England, involving urban residents, community groups, public sector officers and urban professionals. The framing of the project built on perspectives from participatory architecture, urban geography, planning, public engagement, environmental psychology, and engineering to understand how care is embedded into community-led and policy-led urban development, exploring the interface between the two, and engaging different participants on the question of how this could be designed into future urban policy and practice. The design and deployment of a relational mapping protocol, forms the focus of this paper. The mapping protocol has been key to spatialise how care is understood, by whom and where it is positioned within webs of relations across institutional and non-institutional urban collectives, sites of practices and loci of decision-making. We conclude by discussing how our relational mapping tool can help answer the question of what forms of ‘caring—with’ practices successfully recognise, value, support and amplify care within cities.